Seagate affirms leadership position, rewards channel partners

Disc drive manufacturer Seagate's outlook on the Indian market remains
positive and encouraging, despite fierce competition from vendors like Samsung,
Maxtor and Western Digital amongst others. A recent AC Nielsen study revealed
that Seagate led the hard disc drive market in India with more than 60 percent
market share (in terms of units) for the personal and enterprise storage market
segments in the second quarter of 2004. To reward its channel partners that
helped achieve this success, Seagate treated over 40 chosen partners to a
three-day offsite at Dubai.

Against the backdrop of the June announcement of 12 new products that claimed
to address 97 percent of the total available market for disc drives, Seagate
followed up in late July with the announcement that all its internal drives in
the distribution and retail channels would be covered by a five-year warranty
program.

Explaining Seagate's stand on the five-year warranty program, Seagate
India, Country Manager, Sharad Shrivastava said, "There was a deep-felt
need for higher warranty for a critical systems building-block like disc drives.
And with Seagate's quality, we had the confidence to support such a
program".

Added Seagate Asia Pacific VP and MD BS Teh, "It also gave us an
opportunity to exhibit our aggressive posturing in the market". None of the
other vendors have followed up with a similar announcement as of now.

The slew of new product announcements in June included the first enterprise
class 2.5-inch drive - SAVVIO, which is very different from the mobile product (Momentus).
Others included an array of new products last month, targeting new applications
such as Near On-line storage - for which, the company announced the industry's
first half-tera byte external hard drives with (500GB) disc drive. Also included
were portable external hard drives (with upto 100GB) capacity and the world's
first pocket external hard drives a 5GB 1-inch hard drive for hand held
applications.

Outlining product trends, Teh said, "One of the major trends that we
foresee in the near future is the wider adoption of Serial ATA from Parallel
ATA. It is also anticipated that smaller form factor disc drives (2.5 inch) will
start finding favor in the desktop space".

An emerging market for Seagate is the consumer electronics segment- gaming,
audio players and broadcasting (set top boxes, PVR, etc). Though a small
opportunity in the Indian context, the global market for HDDs in this segment is
said to be growing at a CAGR of over 40 percent.

IISHWAR DAAS NAIR

DUBAI

(The author traveled at the hospitality of Seagate)